Saturday, September 7, 2013

Apple, Samsung drop one patent each from second California case (spring 2014 trial)

Apple and Samsung are preparing two California trials (as well as working on litigation in other jurisdictions including Australia, where a trial over standard-essential Samsung patents will be held soon) in parallel:

On November 12, 2013, Judge Lucy Koh's court in San Jose will hold a limited damages retrial, at which a replacement for roughly $400 million of last year's $1.05 billion damages award in the parties' first lawsuit has to be determined, with Samsung hoping for a reduction while Apple has decent chances of actually getting more money.

On March 31, 2014, the trial in the second Northern California trial will begin, and that one is far more interesting than the first case in terms of the impact of an injunction sought by Apple because the patents are, on average, considerably more powerful.

Late on Friday, Apple and Samsung filed a stipulation to drop one patent each from the second California case, as a narrow-your-case-step-by-step order by Judge Koh, issued in April 2013, required them to do. The order originally set a September 2 deadline for this, but it was extended until Friday. Ultimately, by February 6, 2014, the parties will have to limit their asserted patents claims to five (per side) and their accused products to ten (per side).

In late June, the parties withdrew (without prejudice in each case, therefore allowing reassertion on a later occasion) two patents each, and still had six patents-in-suit per party, which I listed. With the Friday filing, either party is down to five patents. From here on out, they will still have to drop claims and the court might throw out patents on summary judgment (and there will be reductions of invalidity contentions), but the April case management order per se wouldn't preclude the parties from taking all of the remaining patents-in-suit, which I now list further below, to trial (by asserting one claim per patent).

Samsung has withdrawn U.S. Patent No. 6,292,179, which is related to software keyboards. Samsung's track record with non-standard-essential patent assertions against Apple is that it has consistently failed whenever it tried. It also has a high-drop out rate with its SEPs, but won at least a few infringement findings. Samsung's "final five" patents list now contains two SEPs -- that's 40%, despite the fact that it knows it can hardly obtain an injunction over them.

Given that this is an important juncture in the case-narrowing effort for Apple v. Samsung II, I'm now going to provide an updated list of the remaining patents-in-suit. It will be a useful reference in the months ahead.

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About Me

Florian Mueller is an app developer who used to be an award-winning intellectual property activist. His 30 years of software industry expertise span different market segments (games, education, productivity and infrastructure software), diverse business models, and technical and commercial areas of responsibility. In recent years, Florian advised a diversity of clients on the patent wars surrounding mobile devices, and on their economic and technical implications. (In order to avoid conflicts of interest, Florian does not hold or initiate transactions in any technology stocks or derivatives thereof, except that he is long AAPL.) He is now developing games for smartphones and tablet computers.